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Is there any way to read the Picasa database?
What is the format of the Picasa database?
Are there any APIs to access the database?
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In the database folder (on Windows 7: C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2\db3), there are some pmp files representing the following tables: albumdata, list of the albums (folders and faces) with some metadata.
When you use the Save to Disk and the File > Save options, Picasa creates a copy of your photo with all edits applied and moves the original to a subfolder called '. picasaoriginals'. This subfolder is hidden on your computer and isn't visible in Picasa. This automatic backup lets you undo or revert your saves.
The good news, you don't have to. Moving your Google Picasa to a new computer is simple as long as you first copy all your photos and, Picasa is installed under the same user paths as your old system.
In Picasa 3 at least, the internal database is stored in a set of .pmp files that sits alongside the .db files, in one of the standard locations for Picasa's application data. On the Mac for instance, it is under $HOME/Library/Application Support/Google/Picasa3/db3
Rather confusingly, the .db files don't contain the database, they are just containers that hold thumbnail previews for various groups of images. They are in the standard Windows thumbs.db format, more information from this answer.
The .pmp files contain the database, and are in a non-standard format. There is a cluster of files per table, with one file per field. The filenames for a given table share the same prefix. For example, the data in the catdata table comes from this set of files:
$ ls -1 catdata_* catdata_0 catdata_catpri.pmp catdata_name.pmp catdata_state.pmp which has three fields, catpri, name and state. I've written up some partial notes in a blog on the format of these files as of Picasa 3.9.0.522, as well as a small java program to dump out as much of the data as I've been able to understand.
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